Score jump after inquiries

[Anonymous]

Ok, so I recently applied for two new cards, the discover secured card and the ducks unlimited card. Neither one seems to be reporting yet, but my experian score has jumped from 697 to 736 after these two inquiries hit. I was under the impression that inquiries lower your score, not improve it. Or is it possible the cards are already reporting to experian and just not showing up? That's the only reason I can come to for why my score would jump by that much. Any insight would be appreciated.

[Remedios]

What are you using to monitor your reports? 

[KLEXH25]

Do you have any other cards besides these two? I think I remember seeing a score increase when I went from only 1 card to 2 and 3 cards.

[Anonymous]

^^^ I saw the same jumps.

[Anonymous]

I'm using myfico to monitor my scores, and I effectively went from 2 cards to 3. I closed my cap1 secured card and replaced it with the discover card.

[Anonymous]

Fico scores don't increase 30-40 points from inquiries.  Inquiries can lower scores or cause them to stay the same.  If your scores increased 30-40 points, it was 100% for a different reason.

[KLEXH25]

I think increasing the number of revolving accounts and increasing your available credit helped with the point increase and negated the points lost from new inquiries. However this does not apply after you go past three accounts.

[Anonymous]

I was pretty positive it was due to underlying factors, but it listed the inquiry with the increase each time and that tripped me up.

[Anonymous]

Not all score increase causes are alertable occurrences. Often you may see a score bump without being notified, but then have something that is an alertable event, like an inquiry, happen. You then go look, see the inquiry and the higher score, and connect the two erroneously. As BBS stated, inquiries are negative or at best neutral events scorewise - something else coincided with the inquiries, and it was that event that boosted your score.

[Anonymous]

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@Anonymous wrote:
I was pretty positive it was due to underlying factors, but it listed the inquiry with the increase each time and that tripped me up.

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Classic case of believing that the score change provided with an alert was related to that alert reason.  Not your fault at all, but really something MF needs to rectify as this has been going on for far too long.