Brokerages ride bull market

For brokerage firms on Wall Street and Main Street, these areglory days.

Nobody could buy the kind of publicity created by this boom boommarket. Even people only casually interested in business now arefollowing the ascent of the Dow Jones industrial average, the closelywatched market monitor.

Running ahead of the stock market, shares in the publicly heldbrokerage firms have bounced upward. Brokerage firm stockstraditionally "outperform the market on the upside and outrun themarket on the downside," said Perrin Long, brokerage analyst withLipper Analytical Services in New York.

While the Dow Jones industrial average has climbed 28 percentsince late last …