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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.”