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Reno Bianchi sees little difference between the cutting world of fencing and the cutthroat world of finance.

Both involve controlling your emotions, waiting for an opening, and pouncing at just the right moment. There’s no room in either for a devil-may-care attitude, which would cost the part-time épéeist and full-time Citigroup bond trader plenty of points on the mat and dollars on the trading floor. “I can’t afford to be a swashbuckler,” he says. “I’ve got to be ready to close my position and move on. To continually risk a client’s capital would be a recipe for disaster. If my strategy was to always go for broke, I’d have a very short career.”

Fencing has traditionally been an Old World sport dominated by Europeans who devote their lives to it. In the United States, fencing is usually thought of as something used to restrain cattle, and few Americans would be able to tell you the difference between an épée and a bread knife.

That helps explain why the Italian-born Bianchi, at the advanced age of 46, was able to slice up the American épée world in July 2006 by winning the U.S. Division 1A Nationals in Atlanta. Though he once came within a blade’s width of competing in the Olympics, the bond trader had not brandished a blade competitively for 16 years. During the six-round tournament, Bianchi neatly skewered some of the country’s premier épéeists, most of them half his age. “It was very, very funny,” he says with barely disguised glee. “People had no idea who I was or where I had come from. Outside of my wife, Lynn, and my 11-year-old son, Alessandro, nobody knew me from squat.”

That anonymity was one of Bianchi’s secret weapons. Whether on a fencing mat or behind an office computer, he capitalizes on his stealth—his ability to strike with strategic deceptiveness. Bianchi is intense and focused, a finicky refiner, someone who ponders and perfects. He wields his sword much as he does his intellect for investing: with a bounding grace, an aggressiveness that is sometimes sly and sometimes feverish.

The Milan native’s love of fencing grew out of watching Guy Williams’ campy swordplay in the 1950s Disney television series Zorro. “I enjoyed watching Zorro, but I was never into the romantic dance of Hollywood fencing,” Bianchi says. “The beautifully choreographed fight sequences of Errol Flynn or Tyrone Power or even Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean have nothing to do with the sport.”

Modern sport fencing has three weapons—foil, saber, and épée, a close cousin to the long-bladed rapier used in dueling. Each weapon is featured in a separate event. When he was nine, Bianchi began with the relatively light, rectangular-shaped foil (with which a fencer scores points by touching opponents with its tip) and quickly moved on to the saber (the edge of which can also be used to score). “I was hotheaded,” he says, “I argued with judges the way John McEnroe did in tennis.”

After protesting a little too heatedly at one tournament and getting disqualified, he switched to épée. “Épée matches are rarely decided by judgment calls,” he explains. In épée, points are awarded solely on the basis of which fencer makes a touch first, according to electronic scoring machines.

During Bianchi’s childhood, Milan was a hotbed for épée fencing—Milanese épée master Edoardo Mangiarotti won more Olympic medals and world championships than any other fencer in history—and by 14, Bianchi was going one-on-one with some of Italy’s top teens. He was a member of two clubs, Giardino and Mangiarotti, that won five Italian team titles; Mangiarotti finished second at the 1979 European Club championships. Bianchi made the national team and seemed a lock to represent Italy at the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow until the Italian Federation announced a partial boycott to protest the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. “Italy only sent three of its five épéeists,” says Bianchi. He was not one of them.

Despite that disappointment, Bianchi continued to fence. He was awarded a fencing scholarship to Wayne State University in Michigan, where he won the N.C.A.A. Division I individual épée crowns in l983 and 1984, and led the Tartars to four national team titles. After graduating, he got an M.B.A. at the University of Washington, in Seattle. He joined Citigroup in 1987 and fenced after work with the New York Athletic Club, but he found it was taking up too much time. He quit altogether in 1989, after the N.Y.A.C. épée team won its second straight national title.

Bianchi’s interest in fencing was reignited in spring 2006 by his son, who had begun taking lessons near their home in Dobbs Ferry, New York. “It was your typical midlife crisis,” Bianchi says. “Eighty percent of the people in my situation buy a Mercedes convertible, 19 percent find a 20-year-old lover, and 1 pecent go back to the sport they love. I was in that last group.”

For four months, he trained with Ukrainian coach Alexey Cheremsky, a former member of the Soviet Union’s national team. Bianchi practiced four times a week, supplementing his lessons with stretching, yoga, and twice-weekly visits to a chiropractor. Eventually he found himself in Atlanta, facing competitors who were all at least 15 years younger than him.

From her perch in the stands at the Nationals, Lynn Bianchi overheard a couple of spectators discussing her husband. “See that guy over there?” said one. “He’s old and he’s fat and he’s bald, but he kicked the other guys’ butts.”