This paper provides a comprehensive evaluation of the short-horizon
predictive ability of economic fundamentals and forward premia on monthly
exchange rate returns in a framework that allows for volatility timing. We
implement Bayesian methods for estimation and ranking of a set of empirical
exchange rate models, and construct combined forecasts based on Bayesian Model
Averaging. More importantly, we assess the economic value of the in-sample and
out-of-sample forecasting power of the empirical models, and find two key
results (i) a risk averse investor will pay a high performance fee to switch
from a dynamic portfolio strategy based on the random walk model to one which
conditions on the forward premium with stochastic volatility innovations; and
(ii) strategies based on combined forecasts yield large economic gains over the
random walk benchmark. These two results are robust to reasonably high
transaction costs.