BlackRock (BLK), one of the largest money managers in the world, and the owner and manager of the iShares ETF family, pointed out Monday (February 1) that:

The current weakness (with stocks down around 6.5%) is roughly in line with the 5% to 8% declines we saw periodically last year as stocks climbed 60% from their March 2009 lows through year-end. From our perspective, we think it is likely that while the current correction may not yet be over, neither is the cyclical bull market.

Over the past 18 months, housing prices have retreated sharply from the highs reached at the end of the housing boom. However, there are reasons to believe that one of the longest and most severe housing slumps ever is nearing an end. Building permits recently increased to a 584,000 yearly pace, well above the forecasted 570,000 and the highest level since November 2008. Construction of single-family houses, which accounted for 84% of the industry last month, increased 2.1% to an annual rate of 482,000, while work on multifamily homes jumped 67% to an annual rate of 92,000. And most recently, home sales for November surged 7.4% over the previous month, reaching the highest level since February 2007 on a seasonally-adjusted basis.

On the high-end side of the market, Robert Toll, CEO of luxury home giant Toll Brothers said during a Bloomberg Television interview on Dec. 11. that “there is a pretty good reservoir of pent-up demand, we don’t know how fast we’re coming back, but we do know we’re coming back.” The company also recently reported a 42% surge in fiscal fourth-quarter orders, suggesting that demand is beginning to come back for luxury homes as well. The increase has not been limited to any one particular area of the country either: gains were recorded in all four regions of the country in November.

The reasons for the incredible rise of the ETF industry are numerous. Intra-day trading, enhanced transparency, and efficient tax features are all features that investors, individual and institutional alike, have embraced in record numbers. But perhaps the main reason why ETFs have attracted hundreds of billions of dollars in assets in recent years is the competitive cost structure they offer relative to traditional actively-managed mutual funds. Investors frustrated with the inability of most active managers to consistently beat their benchmark have been fleeing mutual funds in record numbers, embracing indexing as a strategy and ETFs as a preferred investment vehicle.

But investing in ETFs doesn’t necessarily mean that investment expenses are kept to a minimum. Expense ratios among ETFs can vary significantly, and several of the most popular ETFs charge more than twice the fees of otherwise similar products. Reducing a portfolio’s weighted-average expense is a relatively easy task that can have a big impact on the bottom line. With the holiday season in full swing, we’ve channeled our inner Ebenezer Scrooge, identifying five ETFs found in most investor portfolios that can be replaced by low-cost competition: