While stock picking strategies are in principle meant to exploit evidence of predictability in individual stock specific risk, most equity managers, as a result of their bottom-up security selection decisions, often end up making discretionary, and most of the time unintended, bets on market, sector and style returns as much as they make bets on individual stock returns. In this paper, we show how portfolio managers in the Eurozone can benefit from using derivatives markets to actively manage their asset allocation decisions in a systematic manner. Using a robust econometric process based on a non-linear multi-factor thick and recursive modeling approach, we report statistically and economically significant evidence of predictability in Dow Jones EURO STOXX 50 excess return. These econometric forecasts can be turned into active portfolio decisions and implemented via Eurex equity index futures to generate active asset allocation portable alpha benefits. We also show that adding active sector rotation decisions to asset allocation decisions allows one to significantly lower the portfolio volatility as a result of the benefits of bet diversification. We finally explain how active portfolio managers can benefit from using suitably designed Eurex option strategies as portable beta vehicles. In particular, option portfolios can be used to enhance the performance of tactical asset allocation programs by consistently adding value during the periods of low volatility when timing strategies are known to perform rather poorly. The benefits of active asset allocation decisions reported in this paper originate from the combination of a robust econometric and portfolio process on the one hand, and efficient trading of low cost investible products such as Eurex equity index futures and
options on the other hand. This strongly suggests that most long/short managers could use a similar methodology to enhance the performance of their portfolios without having to rely on the alleged superior performance of any specific predictive model.