@Thomas_Thumb wrote:
@SouthJamaica wrote:I believe I detected this morning a minor FICO 8 installment utilization threshold at 40%.
I picked up a group of small loans a few months ago, have been gradually paying them off, and have been watching EX FICO 8 and 2 on a daily basis to see what happens as aggregate installment utilization slowly drops.
I expected something to happen when I crossed 50% but nothing happened.
Today I crossed 40%, going from 40.7% to 36.4%, and my EX FICO 8 -- which has been very stable -- increased 2 points.
(Something else happened the same day... a hard pull. Theoretically that might have muffled the impact. But I doubt it, because my EX inquiries are already so high that another HP wouldn't have done a thing).
By my definition, a score should change atleast 5 points with the attribute effectively isolated to be classified as a threshold. 2 or 3 point changes are noise and should be considered incidental. Otherwise, everything becomes a threshold and defining something as a threshold loses meaning.
As a general rule, I agree with you, but in this case the EX score was extremely stable, sitting like a lump on a log despite lots of little things going on. Then on a clear day -- when nothing else happened but this -- it budged 2. Made me think there was a slight disturbance in the force.
Today, when my EQ report caught up to EX, the EQ FICO 8 jumped 6 points... again with nothing else of any significance going on. Will be interesting to see if TU FICO 8 confirms.
Huh, I'm not sure where the concept of "noise" in credit scores is coming from... I have never seen a change in my score that could not be attributed to some change in my file. I also got a couple of points going from >99% utilization on my loans to 98% utilization so I definitely think there are points to be gained in loan utilization outside of the big barriers of 65% and 9%.
AU: 
I follow my scores very closely, there was no crossing of thresholds for age of accounts and no change in credit card utilization.