@Anonymous wrote:On November 3, I applied and was (very surprisingly) approved for a Sallie Mae World MasterCard. Later that day, I received an alert that my Experian score had gone up 21 points from the inquiry that Barclays did. I thought it might have been gone up because I was approved for a new card (as opposed to the inquiry itself), but today I woke up and find that my Experian score went up an additional 6 points for the reason of "New Account" (my Sallie Mae), so I assume that my 21 point increase wasn't from the approval of the new card after all. Furthermore, my TransUnion score had an alert for a 10 point increase due to the hard inquiry that Barclays did.
I thought hard inquiries always hurt your scores -- why would an inquiry cause the score to go up (not that I'm complaining, now my Experian and Transunion scores are finally above 650).
TL;DR - your first inclination was right, an inquiry may not move your score downward, but it is never a positive.
Longer response: It didn't cause the increase, but both the EX and TU monitoring have even less resolution than the EQ-style Scorewatch.
Not all changes are reported by the monitoring solutions; I'm even having balance changes go unremarked on both of the abovementioned bureaus, and as such the changes aren't happening instant in time. If every single little change generated an alert, and on the assumption they were sequential / real-time, then we could point at something and say "my score did this because of that, !*&#@?" but in this case I know I get sometimes up to 9 changes (I counted once) without an alert being generated, and that includes massive ones like a tax lien being airstruck.
End of the day until we get better resolution monitoring some of the interstitial changes with time have to be taken with a grain of salt. To be fair, I even know this and I got badly confused recently when I had a balance change happen combined with another change which I was expecting no movement on, and I dropped 18 points on one report... more careful analysis shows my FICO 8 moving like a 18-wheeler skidding on ice on comparitively small balance changes, so getting as clean as possible this month to see where things are.
Do you actually have the credit reports for before and after?
I just don't buy it.
I'm more of the opinion that something is awkward in the monitoring before I believe that. We've never, ever seen that behavior in any prior monitoring solution to date, and it just doesn't jive with all of our anecdotal evidence since call it 2007 where this forum started and people really began analyzing things here.