A fund that outperformed 98% of its peers believes that the market's selling-off due to tariffs was excessive.

A French fund manager is buying heavily battered European industrial stocks, betting that investors are overly worried about the trade tariffs imposed by US President Donald Trump. Leonard Cohen of Ginjer Asset Management hopes this contrarian bet will replicate his successful prediction for bank stocks in 2019, a strategy that has consistently outperformed his peers in recent years. Cohen's Ginjer Actifs 360 fund currently holds around 173 million euros worth of European assets, and has outperformed 98% of similar funds in the past five years, largely thanks to the strong rebound in European banking stocks. Now, his investment strategy is shifting towards some industrial stocks that have been disproportionately affected by trade war concerns, looking for value there. "There is a solution, and in this case it is not irreversible. When the market realizes this, the rebound could be very sharp," Cohen, CEO of Genjer, said in an interview in Paris. "Our investments don't need the situation to be perfect, they just need to be slightly better than what the market reflected during the sell-off period."