We address an interesting case - the predictability of excess US asset returns from macroeconomic factors within a flexible regime-switching VAR framework - in which the presence of regimes may lead to superior forecasting performance from forecast combinations. After documenting that forecast combinations provide gains in predictive accuracy and that these gains are statistically significant, we show that forecast combinations may substantially improve portfolio selection.We find that the best-performing forecast combinations are those that either avoid estimating the pooling weights or that minimize the need for estimation. In practice, we report that the best-performing combination schemes are based on the principle of relative past forecasting performance. The economic gains from combining forecasts in portfolio management applications appear to be large, stable over time, and robust to the introduction of realistic transaction costs. © 2008 Emerald Group Publishing Ltd. All rights reserved.