For your credit report, more accounts is better?

Today I decided to review my credit status at CreditKarma, and found that all components of the report were listed as excellent, except for one—the number of accounts I have on record—which was listed as “Poor”, with the number of accounts being in the range of 6-10. Uh-oh.

So my first thought was, “Yeah, I do have too many accounts open—like that high-yield online checking account I never use. It’d probably be a good idea to close all of the non-critical accounts.”

But then I clicked on the “More details...” link and, to my surprise, discovered that the problem wasn’t that I have too many accounts open—no, the problem was that I have too few!

According to CreditKarma, to have this component of my credit record to report “Excellent”, I would need 21+ accounts! That just doesn’t make any sense to me at all.