Charles O. Prince III cannot catch a break.

Three weeks ago, Mr. Prince, the chief executive of Citigroup, brushed aside concerns that the era of easy money for buyout deals was about to end, optimistic that the banking giant was “still dancing.”

But as credit problems that started in subprime mortgages have pushed into the broader market, many on Wall Street think the music has stopped. Mr. Prince says the recent market pullback “feels sharp,” but he is insistent that Citigroup will keep moving.

“We see a lot of people on the Street who are scared,” Mr. Prince, 57, said during an interview Wednesday in his wood-paneled office at Citigroup’s Park Avenue headquarters. “We are not scared. We are not panicked. We are not rattled. Our team has been through this before.”

Timing has never been Mr. Prince’s forte. In mid-July, Citigroup posted its second consecutive quarter of strong results, with an 18 percent increase in income. With signs that a turnaround was working, the company’s stock appeared poised for a move.

Then the credit markets collapsed, and Citigroup’s shares tumbled along with most financial stocks.

“The irony is that this has been by far the best two quarters for Chuck Prince since he was named chief executive” in October 2003, said Michael Mayo, a banking analyst for Deutsche Bank. “But the ultimate measure of the C.E.O.’s performance is its stock price, and on that point, Citigroup has woefully underperformed.”

Yesterday, Citigroup’s shares closed at $47.24, up 2 percent. That is 24 cents higher than when Mr. Prince took over for Sanford I. Weill. Over the same four-year period, Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase shares have soared more than 23 percent.

Investors, consequently, have not warmed to Mr. Prince’s plans for growth. While calls for him to step down have subsided, many on Wall Street are still unconvinced that the bank is in the right hands. Mr. Prince, though disappointed with the share price, pointed to the early signs of progress and said he was upbeat about the company’s direction.

“I think our performance is going to last much longer than the market turbulence does,” he said.

Since taking the helm four years ago, Mr. Prince has confronted one crisis after another. He went from resolving regulatory problems in Europe and Japan to bowing to American regulators in order to lift an ban on big acquisitions. He promised heavy investment in the company’s ailing businesses, only to watch expenses spiral out of control. He appointed a cost-control czar to shore up his management team, only to reshuffle the group a month later after the ouster of Todd S. Thomson, in part for flying Maria Bartiromo, the CNBC anchor, on Citigroup’s corporate jet.

Only recently, Mr. Prince has started to find his groove. His new finance chief, Gary L. Crittenden, has been well received both inside and outside the company and credited with instilling financial discipline.

A corporate overhaul started in April has helped reverse the trend of expenses outpacing revenue. And while Citigroup’s North American consumer division is still limping along, its investment banking and overseas operations have been on a tear. International revenue surged 12 percent in the second quarter.

“He’s got some small signs of progress, but this is not an easy task to turn the ship around,” an analyst at Banc of America Securities, John McDonald, said.

“The validation will come over the next couple of quarters,” Mr. McDonald added. “The last quarters, while outstanding, were reliant on a robust capital market environment that may not exist anymore.”

In the interview Wednesday, Mr. Prince said he was forging ahead with plans to create a leaner company and accelerate growth.

Analysts say that will be difficult, given the size and complexity of Citigroup’s businesses and years of underinvestment in its technology. The choppiness of the debt and equity markets only complicates the task.

Mr. Prince’s strategy calls for streamlining operations by cutting layers of management and upgrading computer systems. He wants to strengthen the connections between the bank’s businesses while bolstering its operations in faster-growing markets overseas.

But he offered a few adjustments to his plan, some of which Citigroup’s directors discussed at the annual retreat in mid-July. Instead of examining one or two businesses, Citigroup’s directors took a comprehensive look at the company’s overall direction for the next five years.

Internationally, Mr. Prince said the company was rethinking its investment strategy. While Citigroup has no plans to pull out of the 100 or so countries where it operates, he said the company will begin to concentrate on a smaller number of countries where it can build market share.

With more than 60 percent of its revenue expected to come from international operations, Mr. Prince expressed a desire for more people from overseas to fill upper management positions and serve on the board. Only four of 15 Citigroup directors were born or live overseas.

Across Citigroup, Mr. Prince said, executives were pruning the portfolios of its core businesses in order to improve overall returns. There are no plans to sell or spin them off.

“This is about being smarter, getting things on and off the balance sheet faster,” he said, “and the velocity of assets — as opposed to changing the configuration.”

Institutionalizing cost-cutting efforts is another focus. The company recently hired its first chief restructuring officer, who will identify more areas for savings.

“Every year, when we do our budget, we want to build into the budget 3 to 5 percent cost reductions,” Mr. Prince said. “We don’t want to wait for a big bang and take a big charge.”

That could help quiet investors.

“I think investors want better results,” Mr. McDonald, the analyst, said. “They want to see a clearer connection between the strategy and the financial results. Having two good quarters under the belt is a good start, but I still sense people expect improvement in the cost-savings area.”

More immediately, Mr. Prince faces the challenge of navigating the volatile markets. Investors have grown increasingly concerned that the problems in the subprime mortgage market could spread elsewhere in the economy.

More attuned to risks, they turned their backs on the leveraged buyout loans that fueled the recent buyout boom. That could force the banks to sell the loans at a discounted price, lowering revenue, or carry them on their balance sheets and swallow potentially large write-downs. Citigroup has one of the biggest loan books on Wall Street.

Only a few weeks ago, Mr. Prince played down the prospect of a disruption to the credit markets when he told The Financial Times that the flood of liquidity meant that Citigroup was “still dancing” to the music of the buyout boom.

This week, however, Mr. Prince noted that investors who once snapped up leveraged loans with easy financing terms were pretty much on the sidelines as the “market shakes itself out and probably will for a period of time.”

But he pointed out that despite the disruption in the credit markets, the underlying businesses that were borrowing the money were doing fine.

And he expressed confidence in his capital markets managers, who have worked together through seven or eight credit cycles. “We have had a period of great liquidity excess,” Mr. Prince said. “What we are seeing now is a pullback into a range of more normal kinds of credit experiences.

“Deals are happening. Financing is occurring,” he added. “But it is occurring not in the lax kind of way or excess kind of way but in ways that have been more traditional.”