Wall Street paid its largest bonuses to specialists in commodity trading and mergers and acquisitions, the areas where the firms are making the most money.

Senior merger specialists will likely see on average a 25% addition to their base annual salaries that hover around $900,000, and oil and gas traders can get their salaries of about $1.3 million supplemented by about 10%.

``Every four or five years you have a new group of stars,’’ says Alan Johnson, president of Johnson Associates. ``Once, you had equities. Then you had investment bankers. And now you have energy traders. Who would have ever thought it would be the commodities guys?’’

Merger bankers were completely worth their salt for the companies this year, as the volume of global merger deals hit $2 trillion, rising 65% from 2003.

Trading profit from energy divisions helped to boost the revenue from fixed-income division including commodities, currencies and bonds that fared very well in the past year. Bond trading showed a much bleaker picture as bond trading volume declined 4.1%. Corporations issued less debt as the company balance sheets were flush with cash and the Fed kept raising the rates at a “measured” pace of quarter-point increases.

Deborah Rivera, president of the Succession Group, a New York executive-search firm, says the bonuses this year show an 8% increase from a year earlier. Bonuses will rise at a quicker pace in the Asian divisions and slightly slower in Europe.