Hi HockeyDad. Welcome to the forums!
I am guessing that you are a subscriber to the myFICO 3B Monitoring product, which gave you an "alert" that you are trying to describe for us.
The alert is describing a way your report has changed. (In this case, one of your credit card balances went up, it sounds like.) When an "alertable" event occurs, the MF 3B monitoring product pulls your score again.
The message that accompanied the alert is explaining what the alertable event was. But there are a lot of events that are not alertable. What must have happened (with 100% certainty) is that something else changed on your report, either on the same day or in the previous several weeks. That other thing is what is causing your score to go up. It's just that this good thing apparently wasn't alertable, so your score wasn't pulled at the time.
Again, it's really important to understand what these alerts are and what they are not. Most of us assume that when our score changes then MF sends us an alert telling us why. This is not what the alerts are. What the alerts do is tell you -- in a very limited set of circumstances, not all the time -- when the report has changed. The alert is telling you what alertable event happened.
You should congratulate yourself that you are coming to understand scoring well enough to realize that a credit card balance going up would be very unlikely to cause your score to go up. (The only exception would be if all your cards were $0, and then one card went from $0 to say $50.)
Some people find an "alert" based system confusing and unhelpful, since it cannot be relied on (even most of the time) to explain why your score has changed. Such people switch to a system like CCT, which enables you to control when your score is pulled or (like me) they just use free tools to get their monthly FICO score and credit reports.
There are many things that could have happened recently to cause your score to go up. For example, your average age of accounts could have gone from 1.9 years to 2.1 years. That would have been invisible to you but could have had a definite positive effect on your score. There are many other possibilties.
Some things are definite gray areas in credit scoring, where nobody knows for sure how FICO is working. But CC balances are not one of them. All credit profiles are optimized when having most of the credit cards reporting at $0 and a small positive balance on one. There's no possible profile that benefits from a higher utilization -- e.g. 5% compared with 2% say.
The folks here can help you achieve the higher score you want but we'll need to ask you questions about how your credit reports look. Let us know if you'd like to do that. Best wishes for a great 2017.
PS. The fact that your TU score went down while EQ and EX went up likely indicates that your three reports do not have exactly the same things on them with the same balances on every day of the month. The TU score might be reflecting the increase in util whereas the the EQ and EX scores might be reflecting a nonalertable but good change that happened a week ago.
