The benchmark Standard & Poor’s GSCI gauge advanced 20%, more than the 9.1% gain in the MSCI World Index of stocks and 5.3% return on a Bank of America Merrill Lynch index of Treasuries. Currency traders are betting on a stronger dollar, sending a contrarian signal because commodities moved in an opposite direction to the currency in 16 of the past 20 quarters, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

Silver, an investment and an industrial material, will jump as much as 37% next year, leading gains in the 15 commodities covered in a Bloomberg survey of more than 100 analysts, traders and investors. Zinc, this year’s worst-performing metal, will appreciate 21%. Arabica coffee, which reached a 13-year high last week, will be the weakest performer , adding no more than about 7%.

The strength in demand “has been a surprise considering that we’ve just come out of the worst recession since the 1930s and carnage in most asset classes,” Londonbased Roxana Mohammadian-Molina , one of a team of 18 analysts at Barclays Capital who correctly called the bottom in oil and copper last year, said by phone December 22. The bank says US natural gas, will be the only one of the 25 commodity prices it follows that will average less next year.

Stocks Short

Global stocks are still about $11 trillion short of the record $62.6 trillion of market capitalisation reached in October 2007, data compiled by Bloomberg show. Over the same period, commodity assets under management rose about 80% to $354 billion, and will attract a total of $60 billion in new money this year, the second most after 2009, Barclays estimates. The S&P GSCI Index is extending last year’s 50% advance, which also beat the 27% jump in the MSCI World Index and the 3.7% loss on Treasuries.

Investors favored raw materials this year as China, the biggest user of everything from coal to iron ore to zinc, led the recovery from the first global recession since World War II. With economies now expanding , competition for raw materials is intensifying. US growth will rise to 3.25% in the fourth quarter of 2011, from 2.5 percent in the first, according to the median estimates of as many as 66 economists surveyed by Bloomberg. China’s will slow to 9% next year from 10% in 2010.