@SouthJamaica wrote:
@Anonymous wrote:
I agree BBS; however common wisdom right now says it only takes into account the highest individual utilization revolver, but other common wisdom has been proven false, so dps are good!In my experience that so called "common wisdom" is utterly false.
I am quite certain that the number of high utilization accounts matters, and FICO does not discount those which exceed a threshold but not as badly as the highest.
I am no longer passing along "common wisdom" which flies in the face of experience. Another term for "common wisdom" is "the madness of crowds".
Just the facts from Fico employees- NOT common wisdom.
Fico looks at highest account utilization as well as aggregate utilization % and aggregate balance amount in $$. This has all been available in published reason statements for many years.[links provided below].
The # of accounts above a certain utilization could be a scoring factor but, that is not explicitly mentioned in the Q&A. We do know #/% of accounts with balances is a factor. I think a change in aggregate $ amount could be a possibility in this situation but, it is unclear to me that all tof SJ's revolvers (particularly CU accounts) are being counted.
@Anonymous wrote:
@SouthJamaica wrote:I am quite certain that the number of high utilization accounts matters, and FICO does not discount those which exceed a threshold but not as badly as the highest.
This makes sense to me, at least for EX scoring.
I have a 5% aggregate threshold on my scorecard (5% after rounding). If I'm at or above it, I lose EQ 8 -3pts, TU 8 -1pts.
But for EX only, every single card has to be under 5% for a +3pt gain on EX 8 and 2. If just one card is at/or above 5% - no gain.
It's obviously looking at each account separately on my scorecard. Number of high utilization accounts seems more than plausible to me.
Let's hope you never find out about high utilization accounts 
It is not fun.
@Anonymous wrote:
SJ, did your total revolving balances cross any multiples of $5000?
As I told you above, the only change was a little more than $2k on the one account. It moved the individual account from 50-something percent to 40-something percent. It didn't even budge the aggregate revolving utilization percentage.
@Anonymous wrote:
By the way is this evidence?
https://ficoforums.myfico.com/t5/Understanding-FICO-Scoring/We-re-Tom-Quinn-amp-Tommy-Lee-FICO-Score-Experts-Ask-us-anything/m-p/6137461/highlight/true#M176972
Sure.
@Thomas_Thumb wrote:
@SouthJamaica wrote:
@Anonymous wrote:
I agree BBS; however common wisdom right now says it only takes into account the highest individual utilization revolver, but other common wisdom has been proven false, so dps are good!In my experience that so called "common wisdom" is utterly false.
I am quite certain that the number of high utilization accounts matters, and FICO does not discount those which exceed a threshold but not as badly as the highest.
I am no longer passing along "common wisdom" which flies in the face of experience. Another term for "common wisdom" is "the madness of crowds".
Just the facts from Fico employees- NOT common wisdom.
Fico looks at highest account utilization as well as aggregate utilization % and aggregate balance amount in $$. This has all been available in published reason statements for many years.[links provided below].
The # of accounts above a certain utilization could be a scoring factor but, that is not explicitly mentioned in the Q&A. We do know #/% of accounts with balances is a factor. I think a change in aggregate $ amount could be a possibility in this situation but, it is unclear to me that all tof SJ's revolvers (particularly CU accounts) are being counted.
There are a lot of things that are "not explicitly mentioned in the Q&A". That doesn't mean they can be discounted. (a) Some of the questions asked were never answered, (b) not all questions were asked, and (c) some of the answers were vague and almost none were very "explicit".
You have previously suggested that only the highest of the overutilized accounts affects one's scores. I now know that that is simply incorrect.
The number of accounts with unduly high utilization is undoubtedly, in my personal experience, a significant factor.
I hope that you and Birdman7 never find out.
I found out the hard way.
@Anonymous wrote:
@SouthJamaica wrote:It has been stated by some members of this forum that in evaluating individual account overutilization, FICO algorithms just looked at your highest utilization account, and discounted the rest. I have found that that is not the case, and that the number of high utilization accounts does matter, and matters a lot.
I understand your take on it, so that's why I'm not understanding why back in Post 6 it appears you've wrote that factor off... or only want to consider the single account crossing the 50% threshold.
Only one of my four 50%+ accounts went below 50%. That resulted in a 7 point gain in both EX FICO 8 and EX FICO 2.
I'm afraid in this discussion we may be losing sight of the forest for the trees. There's an important lesson to be culled from my experience, which I want to reemphasize to readers: if you have multiple accounts over the 30% or 50% utilization threshold, and want to try to pick up some points, you might be able to improve your score by getting even just one of your accounts below the threshold.
@SouthJamaica wrote:
@Thomas_Thumb wrote:
@SouthJamaica wrote:
@Anonymous wrote:
I agree BBS; however common wisdom right now says it only takes into account the highest individual utilization revolver, but other common wisdom has been proven false, so dps are good!In my experience that so called "common wisdom" is utterly false.
I am quite certain that the number of high utilization accounts matters, and FICO does not discount those which exceed a threshold but not as badly as the highest.
I am no longer passing along "common wisdom" which flies in the face of experience. Another term for "common wisdom" is "the madness of crowds".
Just the facts from Fico employees- NOT common wisdom.
Fico looks at highest account utilization as well as aggregate utilization % and aggregate balance amount in $$. This has all been available in published reason statements for many years.[links provided below].
The # of accounts above a certain utilization could be a scoring factor but, that is not explicitly mentioned in the Q&A. We do know #/% of accounts with balances is a factor. I think a change in aggregate $ amount could be a possibility in this situation but, it is unclear to me that all of SJ's revolvers (particularly CU accounts) are being counted.
There are a lot of things that are "not explicitly mentioned in the Q&A". That doesn't mean they can be discounted. (a) Some of the questions asked were never answered, (b) not all questions were asked, and (c) some of the answers were vague and almost none were very "explicit".
You have previously suggested that
onlythe highest of the overutilized accounts affects one's scores. I now know that that is simply incorrect.
The number of accounts with unduly high utilization is undoubtedly, in my personal experience, a significant factor.
I hope that you and Birdman7 never find out.
I found out the hard way.
I previously stated that the highest individual card utilization is scoring factor (#3), which was corroborated in the recent Q & A.
https://ficoforums.myfico.com/t5/Understanding-FICO-Scoring/FICO-AMA-Discussion-Thread/m-p/6137799#
Back in 2014 Fico mentioned having a candidate set of over 500 predictors. Their published reason code list is rather short by comparison. Are the models using some scoring factors not on the published list? Probably. However, if it is not on the list, then more data is needed to validate a hypothesis.
Single data points are interesting but repeatability and reproduceability across multiple profiles is needed. Isolation of a suspected scoring factor from other potential factors is not always possible. In those cases even more datapoints are needed.
