Gekko.

IT'S tough being a goldbug. You keep thinking you're about to turn into a Monarch butterfly, and then the price gets slammed again and people talk about you as if you're some kind of cockroach. Even technical analysts who can make any market sound like it's about to turn around aren't much help.

But Frank Veneroso and his loyalists haven't given up. Too many goldbugs, in my experience, spend their time reminiscing fondly about oil embargoes, President Carter, and their net worth in 1980.

Veneroso & Co., on the other hand, actually go out and count the flows of gold sellers and buyers. Tedious work, but it's the only way to get to the bottom of what has been a very weird market over the past three years.

In Frank's view, `A big hand is over the gold market. For the past two years, whenever the gold price penetrates $390 an ounce, large sellers have come into the market. I assume that represents one or more central banks liquidating their holdings.'

Now I admit that for a long time I had a problem with what sounded to me like a conspiracy. But Frank's documentation of the supply - demand balance in gold turns out to be very compelling. What you find when you tear apart the statistics is a big increase in the demand coming from the Far East, both from hoarders and from jewelers. According to Veneroso, the standard data on gold demand, which is distributed by the World Gold Council and Gold Fields Mineral Services, has consistently underestimated that demand. For example, the World Gold Council figures that the 1.2 billion people in China imported 224 metric tons of gold in 1994. Chinese sources that Veneroso has found put the country's imports somewhere north of 800 tons.

But the sellers are even more mysterious. Working from the U.S. trade data on gold imports and exports, Veneroso shows that `There is a flow of about 40 tons a month from the U.S., most of which is coming from the foreign central-bank holdings at the New York Federal Reserve Bank.'

Why would central banks want to dump their gold? One of the most credible explanations would be the drive among European central banks to harmonize their reserve policies in preparation for European Monetary Union. The Bundesbank carries about 31 per cent of its foreign-exchange reserves in gold; if the French and Italian central banks spent the past two years bringing their gold holdings to that proportion, it would account for about 1,700 tons of gold selling. That mops up a lot of demand from nouveau-riche Chinese.

So when will the goldbugs' luck change? John Brimelow of BV Capital, who deals in gold stocks, points out that `Since the bounce up in the yen, there is a lot of evidence that the Japanese public is buying gold futures. The yen price of gold has broken a 15-year downtrend in the market.'

It would figure that the central banks would conclude a gold-selling program just as the price turns.

The New York Times never disappoints. Just as it notices a trend, you can count on it to start slowing or reversing. In mid June, the Times finally took notice of the offshore-banking business in Cyprus, with a story titled `Cyprus Shores Wash Dirty Money.' The Times correspondent noticed that much of the money supporting the UN-embargoed Serbs is going through Cyprus, but added, `Money is also pouring into the island from Russian racketeers, sometimes in suitcases filled with hundreds of thousands of dollars, diplomats and bankers said.'

`Did they really say that?' asked a Russian `businessman' I know. Cyprus has been not so hip as a place to put your money through for over a year now. `You go to Hungary, maybe. Cyprus is passe.' This is apparently because the Cypriot authorities started to inform the Russian government, as well as the Americans, about Russian criminals' activities.

Cyprus does still have some attractions as a hot-sheet hotel for money, but like retired prostitutes throughout history, it's trying to clean things up. Still, one notices that the truly advanced part of Cypriot banks is their state-of-the-art wire-transfer capability. The portfolio-management services you find in even more settled, almost entirely straight, offshore centers such as Bermuda have not yet taken hold. In the end, of course, trying to trace dirty money is a losing game. But forget about Cyprus, now that the Times is onto it.

Have you been wondering why the Colombian establishment is finally cracking down (so to speak) on the cocaine trade? It took me aback, I have to say. Then oil-industry friends offered an explanation. One of the big surprises in the commodity and shipping worlds lately has been the sharply improved prospects for a major increase in Colombian oil production. If the country can become a first-rank oil power, then the coqueros become just a liability. The guerrillas and other thugs the coke lords support are bad for the oil business, what with their pipeline attacks and car bombings. So the cleanup may be a real one. The Colombian balance sheet, which is much cleaner than the country's rap sheet, can be kept healthy with black gold rather than white gold.