No. A negative will report as 0. To determine the cause(s) of any scoring change you have to carefully review reports from before and after the scoring change. Applying for a new card is far from the only thing that would cause a score reduction. Additionally, I recommend setting a threshold of at least 20 points. Differences in reported utilization can easily account for such scoring changes.
Originally Posted by
pairofkeets
I pulled my free credit report back in February, but does anyone think its worth the $12.00 x 3 bucks to get a more in depth look into this?
Again, reviewing reports before and after any change is the only way to determine the causes. If you don't want to have to pay for multiple reports you can also use a monitoring service that offers the frequency of pulls that you need. You've only been looking at your Experian FICO 8 score from AmEx. Have you been monitoring any other FICO's for the other 2 major CRA's?
Originally Posted by
pairofkeets
It could be from other reasons but perhaps someone else has experience with this.
Experience doesn't really matter. What's on your reports and how that data changes is what matters. We can provide all sorts of possibilities but that won't really help to determine the cause(s) in your specific case.