Investor newbies, here’s another app to make you rich

Meet the latest app to help you smartly invest the money you’ve been saving under your mattress, SigFig. Instead of letting your hundreds accumulate dust, SigFig helps you accrue capital gains by giving you investment advice.

The foreign language skills needed to read a stock ticker aren’t necessary with SigFig, the company says. The portfolio management system is is aimed at investment newbies who don’t want to pay a financial adviser and is sprinkled with colorful graphs to help even the most financially uneducated understand how their stocks are doing.

Unlike services such as ShareBuilder, ETrade, or Mint, you can’t move your money around with SigFig. Instead you view insights from your portfolio investments — either stocks or retirement accounts — and get advice on how to turn those thousands you’ve invested into hundreds of thousands. Personal finance service and SigFig competitor Personal Capital gives you similar investment insights with colorful graphs. Hong Kong based 8 Securities bridges the gap between the two types of services by allowing investments transactions and providing investment insights.

The team behind the investment portfolio tracker Wikivest is also responsible for SigFig. The company found that people wanted more features within Wikivest, so instead of adding them to its existing service, it decided to build a whole new product. SigFig boasts that its members are collectively managing $30 billion in investments, but that number is partially attributed to people using Wikivest.

SigFig is free and available with a browser and will eventually be accessible through iOS and Android apps. The company makes money by sending new customers to brokerage firms, which in turn compensate SigFig for referring new business.

SigFig has been in beta since early February 2012 and is now a full-featured invite-only service.