We also evaluate the out-of-sample performance of average skewness as a predictor of future market excess returns. We compute out-of-sample one-month-ahead forecasts with several combinations of predictors, including market excess return, market variance and skewness, average variance and skewness, and several economic and financial variables. We find evidence that the predictive power of the average skewness dominates that of the other predictors. We design an allocation strategy based on predictive regressions following Goyal and Welch (2008) and Ferreira and Santa-Clara (2011). We obtain that the average skewness dominates other predictors both in terms of Sharpe ratio and certainty equivalent. These results confirm that average skewness is an important driver of the subsequent market return.