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I woke up on Friday with no internet connection - turned out to be a massive Canada wide outage that affected millions of Canadians. A complete network failure - no Wi-Fi, mobile network or phones. Which means that I could not close the QQQ combo position on Friday. If I was assigned the short options, it would be not that bad - I would be short 200 shares of QQQ and long 4 calls. In terms of delta, it would be not too directional, and I would just close the shares and the calls at the same time. However, IB algorithm is different from other brokers. This is how it works: "Just prior to expiration IB will simulate the effect of exercise or assignment for each expiring position to determine whether the account, post-expiration, is projected to be margin compliant. IB may liquidate positions in the account to resolve the projected margin deficiency for Accounts which do not have sufficient equity on hand prior to exercise." This is exactly what happened. Around 15:30, the algorithm determined that assignment of the short calls with cause margin deficiency, and according to their policy, they liquidate most of the short calls (just enough to prevent margin deficiency). The rest of the short calls were assigned, so I was left short QQQ shares and long significant amount of calls. According to Murphy's laws, the markets gapped down today, and I was forced to close the calls for a significant loss. This is why position sizing is so important. No matter how safe and low risk the trade looks, unexpected can always happen. If you keep your position sizing under control, you can still recover.