Covestor, a social investing site where people share the performance of their real stock portfolios, came out of private beta this morning. Now anyone can join, and it is welcoming voyeurs who only want to watch other’s performance but not share their own. This should broaden the appeal of the site and provide a no-commitment entry point for people who may be uncomfortable with sharing their personal financial data on the Web (i.e., most of the population). President and co-founder Perry Blacher explains the company’s approach:

It was always in our plans. We had a Catch 22 up front where we had to create liquidity of leaders and so couldn’t start off by saying “Come and track the best investors you have never heard of,” because there would have been no one in the room.

We decided to start off by creating a high-barrier-to-entry community where you had to share to participate to build the base. The long term objective is really about building a mass follower proposition for the world’s best self-directed investors and to enable others to invest directly alongside them (de-insitutionalizing fund management) and that requires it all to be open and public.

You would be amazed by people’s willingness to share and the quality of the guys out there. For example, our average member’s portfolio size is greater than $200,000 in securities alone (excluding cash).

Blacher won’t say how many members signed up for the private beta or the total amount of investments the site is tracking. (Competitor Cake Financial is already well over $1 billion). But he does claim that the site’s members include more than ten times as many money managers than work for any professional investment firm (presumably tracking their personal portfolios) and people from more than 50 countries invested in more than 10,000 different stocks. He also estimates that ten percent of all stock bloggers have Covestor portfolios and says that the top 10 most followed investors have averaged a 123.5 percent return so far this year.

Other enhancements to the site include the ability to sort through members by investment goals or most recently viewed. And you can now import your contact list to make it easier to invite people to the site. The company raised $6.5 million last April from Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital. In addition to Cake Financial, it competes with SocialPicks, Vestopia, and Motley FoolCAPS.

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Silicon Valley-based startup Mint, which provides a service that lets users manage their checking, savings and credit card accounts online, will launch a new product on May 6 that lets users track virtually any type of investment account as well. Users will now be able to manage all of their financial assets on the Mint site. With this change, Mint says, 6,500 US financial institutions: 2,520 banks, 1,621 credit cards, and 2,381 investment accounts are supported.

Brokerage, IRA, 401k and 529 assets can be managed. For now, only student loan accounts and mortgages are left off, although support for those types of accounts is coming soon. The site will show all your buys, sells, dividend distributions, etc. across multiple accounts. Dive into a single account or equity for its individual performance. Account performance v. the S&P and other indexes is graphed, and account charges are also shown.

There are some things you still won’t be able to do with Mint, such as stock trades, bill payments and funds transfers. Mint CEO Aaron Patzer says those features will eventually be added, with a focus on bill payments first. Funds transfers and stock trades are a little stickier, though, and may eventually require state and/or federal regulation of the company.

Investments will soft launch on May 6 for very active Mint users and roll out from there. Anyone who wants to be in the beta right at launch (whether they are a current Mint user or not) can sign up at mint.com/techcrunch and will be added on May 6.

Other services, including Cake Financial (another TechCrunch40 startup) Vestopia, Covestor, and UpDown also offer investment tracking.

We’ve been tracking Mint since their launch at TechCrunch40 last year. The 20-person company has now raised $17 million in venture capital and has 230,000 registered users (40% of which are active, Patzer says). 10,000 new users sign up each week (13,000 last week)

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Online bill pay service Billeo has announced a $7 million Series B round of funding. ATA Ventures led the financing, with additional contributions from all of Billeo’s existing investors including Altos Ventures, Claremont Creek and Pacifica Fund.

There have been a lot of startups focused on enhancing your online personal finance, mostly around analyzing your investments (Cake, Zecco, Covestor) or expenditures (Mint, Wesabe). By contrast, Billeo functions as a straight forward tool for automating or remembering to pay your bills online.

You tell Billeo what bills you want to pay automatically or be reminded to pay and their service sends reminders and tracks you payment history online. Although a lot of banks offer online bill payment to third parties, Billeo also tracks your payment stats and compares them to the crowd. If you download the toolbar we previously covered, Billeo will also automatically fill out a lot of financial forms for you online. However, while other financial management tools haven’t incorporated online bill payment, it seems a clear feature addition that will compete with Billeo in the future.

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Call it social finance. A bunch of investing sites, from MarketWatch and Motley Fool CAPS to Cake Financial and Social Picks, let investors create fantasy portfolios and track their performance. The idea is to compete against each other, celebrity investors, and the overall market. The best investors, whether pros or schmoes, rise to the top and collect a following. It’s the online version of the old stock-picking newsletters. One of the most recent additions to this group, Covestor, takes the idea one step further. It links your online portfolio to an actual brokerage account. So there is real money at stake. Since the site’s launch in June, all of the members who have signed up now collectively manage $100 million worth of their own funds.

It takes guts to bear your investing acumen (or lack thereof) to the world. For instance, here is VC Fred Wilson’s Covestor page (down 1.47 percent since he joined about a week ago—Fred, get out of oil and precious metals already!). You can even put a Covestor widget on your blog to further gain a following.

The idea is that eventually, the best investors will emerge, and Covestor plans on creating ways to invest in their “funds.” They are actually just going to be selling the data and linking it to the brokerage accounts of people who choose to be followers. The investing stars who arise from this social soup will be able to offer their trading data for a fee once they build a track record or give it away for free and enjoy the notoriety of being an investing whiz. Covestor will take its cut as a management fee. The New York City startup has raised angel money from the founders of Seekingalpha, Betfair, Tribe.net, and Wallstrip.

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