First Look at Mint.com's Investment Beta

I wrote last month that Mint.com planned to begin pulling investment account data into their free financial service Web site, which up until now tracked online checking, credit card and other accounts but couldn't look at your 401k, IRA or other investments. After getting my invitation e-mail last night, I hopped onto Mint.com today to add my investment accounts.

If you've used Mint.com before, then you'll find that adding a new investment account is much the same as adding one for any other account. On the Accounts page you click the button to add a new account, but now you can choose an investments category.

On that investments tab you can search for your investment holder or bank, or choose from common providers such as E*Trade or Fidelity. Mint knew how to connect to the three places where I have investment accounts.

Once I provided my online logins and passwords (you'll need to have already set up online access for your investment accounts), Mint quickly pulled in current values and holdings in all my accounts. I could then check out performance and portfolio data for it all.

On the new Investments account tab, I can check a graph showing the total amount in each account and total overall, along with the investment breakdown within each account. I can also check a graph comparing the performance of each holding in each account against other holdings, as well as index performances.

Mint's display is good for checking basic things such as stock or fund performance over the last three months, but it doesn't compare to the huge amounts of data you can get from ETrade's interface, for instance. And I wouldn't expect it to. Mint's real value comes from being able to present all-at-once view of your overall financial health, now with investments.

The home page now displays my investment accounts along with my other assets, and includes their totals in my overall cash vs. debt figure. I actually wish it didn't, since I don't want to consider my 401k investments in a snapshot of liquid assets v. debt. But I do like seeing the new 'Portfolio Movers & Shakers' snapshot of investment performance, which is also now shown on the home page.

Overall, I like the new service offering, as I knew I would.  By bringing in my five investment accounts (yeah yeah, I really need to rollover those old 401k's), I can now quickly see how my 12 different accounts with eight different companies are faring. Getting it all from an easy-to-use and free service it only adds icing to the cake.

If you have a Mint account and want to try the investments beta yourself, request an invite here.