Overweighting Insurance Companies / Consumer Discretionary

[TripleB]

Hurricane Irene has got me thinking—in prosperity, insurance companies do well because they don't have to pay out billions in dollars of claims. Also during prosperity, Consumer Discretionary does really well too. The exact opposite occurs when times are bad.

If the goal of the PP is to have stocks go up during prosperity, then perhaps one could internally leverage the stocks towards prosperity and overweight insurance companies and consumer discretion.

[clacy]

I'm a little confused how an economic climate (prosperity), will lead to less claims that are paid by an insurance company.