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With markets roiling from uncertainty, investors looking to dodge some of the volatility might benefit from putting their money into one of the most volatile asset classes around — commodities.

Sounds counterintuitive, right? Chaotic trading on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange floor, futures contracts, speculators. The terms don’t exactly bring to mind the predictability so many investors seek. But for long-term investors desiring insulation from price swings in traditional assets, such as stocks and bonds, moving some money into a broad basket of commodities — wheat, oil, cattle, precious and industrial metals — could be a good bet.

Experts tout commodities as a good hedge against inflation because the price of raw materials tends to rise with the price of the goods they’re used to make.

They also point to their historically negative correlation with the price movement of traditional assets. As Mike Brown, first vice president of investments for UBS Financial Services in St. Louis, put it, it’s an investment that zigs when others zag.

Other analysts agree that, used correctly, commodities can help protect a long-term investor’s portfolio from shifts in the prices of their other assets.

Putting some money into a number of different commodities can reduce your portfolio’s overall volatility and still get returns similar to a portfolio with just stocks and bonds, said Paul Christopher, senior international investment strategist with Wells Fargo Advisors.

Since the market crash of 2008, investors have been looking for alternatives to traditional stocks and bonds. Commodities have been one of those asset classes, and financial analysts and advisers say their popularity has grown noticeably.

Standard & Poor’s GSCI, a broad commodity index, had about $60 billion in financial instruments pegged to it in February 2007, when Goldman Sachs sold the index to Standard and Poor’s. As of the end of March, there was an estimated $75 billion to $80 billion tracking it.

The Dow Jones-UBS Commodity Index, another broad-based index, had about $24.9 billion tracking it in the second quarter of 2006. By the end of 2009, it had $54 billion following it.

Some of that is based on access. Once virtually inaccessible for ordinary investors, new financial instruments produced over the last several years have made it possible to get exposure to commodities without worrying about ending up with a warehouse full of soybeans.

There’s really been an explosion of vehicles for ordinary investors to get commodity exposure, Christopher said.

Mutual funds that invest in commodity futures and equities in businesses such as mining companies have grown more common. Instruments such as exchange-traded funds, or ETFs, which trade like stocks, invest in a number of securities and allow investors to get commodity exposure with the ease of equity trading. For investors new to commodities, analysts recommend they put no more than 10 percent of their portfolio into commodity-related products.

But getting the broad benefits of commodities isn’t as easy as just buying gold bullion or stock in Alcoa. To get the inflation hedging and negative-asset correlation advantages, investors should invest in instruments that are broadly exposed to agriculture, livestock, metals and energy commodities. Even then, expect a relatively volatile asset in the short run.

Our advice for the average investor is not to pick a specific commodity, but invest in a basket, said Cindy Rapponotti, Commerce Trust Company’s director of alternative investment strategy.

Rapponotti recommends that investors who have yet to venture outside of stocks and bonds use products that track a diversified commodity index. She likes the Dow Jones-UBS Commodity Index. Unlike the S&P GSCI, which is weighted based on changes in global production for a particular resource and tends to be heavy in energy, the DJ-UBSCI never allows a group of commodities to make up more than 33 percent of the index and has less energy exposure and more diversification.

Investing in businesses that are dependent on commodities, such as mining and energy companies, can provide similar benefits to the actual thing, but equities still retain exposure to broader market forces. Instruments that track broad indexes or invest in the materials themselves offer purer exposure.

Long-term, Christopher is bullish on commodities. As developing economies continue their growth and urbanization, he expects global demand for raw materials to continue increasing. Add that to the fact that many commodities are becoming harder to access and extract, upward pressure on commodity prices could stay strong for a generation, he said.

But, short-term, Christopher cautioned, there’s still an inventory cycle associated with prices. That can run its course in a matter of months, whereas companies’ business cycles sometimes take years, he said.

Just look at the commodity price plunge in May. Most investors aren’t used to 10 percent to 15 percent fluctuations in their portfolios, Christopher said.

So, the question is, long-term, how much investors will get seasick from that up and down, he said.

As for the inflation-hedging aspect of the investment, Brown doesn’t see much risk for rising prices in the short term. The Federal Reserve is keeping interest rates low, and there’s still substantial slack in the economy. But now is as good a time as ever to protect oneself from inflation, he said.

If you’re a long-term investor, you don’t know when it’s going to happen, but certainly the fundamentals are in place for it, Brown said.

For investors seeking to hedge against fluctuations in stocks and bonds, however, nothing is a sure bet. Guofu Zhou, a professor of finance in Washington University’s Olin Business School, notes that in a crisis, asset prices can quickly begin moving together. During the 2008 market crash, commodity prices dropped off a cliff just like everything else.

That makes David Rolfe, chief investment officer at Wedgewood Partners, skeptical of the conventional wisdom that diversifying into alternative asset classes can insulate investors from market shifts.

When the world collectively says ‘sell,’ the only thing that will help you is cash, he said.

Diversification is always a good strategy, but with world markets becoming more correlated, diversification is not as effective as it once was, Rolfe said.

The growing popularity of commodity investments means there’s an enormous amount of money chasing a relatively small subset of the economy, he said.

That could be artificially inflating prices and pushing down future returns.

In today’s market, a good hedge is hard to find, and not likely to get any easier.

What did Yogi Berra say? ‘The world is becoming more of a global place every day,’ Brown of UBS said. We are becoming one big market.