Palekana, named after the Hawaiian word for “safe,” will launch in December with the backing of William Reeves, the co-founder of BlueCrest Capital Management, which was once one of Europe’s biggest hedge-fund managers.

He will be joined by Gerard Griffin, founder of Tisbury Capital Management, a $2.8 billion event-driven manager, and Jonathan Martin, who worked at BlueCrest and then ran Markham Rae, a $1.25 billion multi-strategy manager.

Palekana will start with a global systematic fund overseen by Mr. Reeves and an event-driven strategy focused on Europe run by Mr. Griffin, while Mr. Martin will serve as chief executive. It expects to add more funds over time, Mr. Griffin said, and aims to manage $1 billion in assets within a couple of years.

“Now that quantitative easing is being replaced with something else, whatever that is, I’m keen to get back into public markets,” said Mr. Griffin, who had recently focused on real estate and private equity.

“Now that the era of easy money and an ever-rising market is behind us, that gets me really excited” about generating returns that would have been harder to achieve over the past decade, he added.

Mr. Griffin said his strategy aims to make money off deals closing, and events such as restructurings, capital raisings and spinoffs. He expects overstretched balance sheets to fuel a rise in defaults.

About three-quarters of Mr. Griffin's event-driven fund will be allocated to outside managers, while he will oversee the rest himself, trading credit, stocks and options.