Billionaire investor John Paulson is setting up to bet more on Europe.
Hedge fund firm Paulson & Co. is in the early stages of preparing a new strategy, the Paulson European Event Equities Fund, according to recent New York state and Monetary Authority of Singapore filings reviewed by CNBC.com.
It was unclear whether Paulson has started marketing the fund and when it would officially launch. A spokesman for Paulson, which runs approximately $20 billion overall and is based in New York, declined to comment on the filings.
So-called event-driven investing, a stock-picking technique that bets on corporate shakeups such as mergers and acquisitions, is Paulson's oldest strategy. His best-known funds focus on such events, and Paulson worked on mergers at Gruss Partners and Bear Stearns before founding his eponymous firm in 1994, a history that was detailed in The Alpha Masters, a book on the hedge fund industry.
The new fund comes as mergers and acquisitions are on the rise.
Global M&A in the second quarter of 2015 nearly matched the record set in 2007, according to data from Thomson Reuters. European M&A is also back up to near pre-financial crisis levels, with $507.4 billion in deals over the first half of 2015, compared to $570.8 billion over the same period in 2008 and $912.2 billion in 2007.
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Paulson & Co. has recently focused more on Europe in its merger and special situations funds.
Recent investments in the region, for example, have included Italian bank Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena; Italian tire company Pirelli; and Irish property trusts Green REIT and Hibernia REIT in Ireland, according to press reports.
The new fund comes just after Paulson launched a vehicle to focus on health care investing, recently a winning strategy for the firm overall.
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Paulson is having a good year after losing money in many funds during 2014. Funds that already bet on company mergers, the firm's core strategy at $11.5 billion in capital, are up: the Partners fund gained 9 percent net of fees through May and the Enhanced fund is up 19 percent, according to a person familiar with the situation. The credit fund also gained 4 percent over the same period.
