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My first margin call ever...freaked me out when I saw the email.
It turned out to be a calendar option spread I had set up in my IRA on apple stock. This was a cash account, so there really was supposed to be no margin anyway. I was long 5 Apple June $400 calls and short 5 May $430 calls. The trade was well into the money and I was going to cash it out or roll the May calls into June calls next week before the May expiration, but for some reason the calls were assigned early. Apple was trading at about $460 and so the broker purchased 500 shares and delivered them to the call holder at $430, leaving me with a negative cash balance of $15,000!!! Now, of course my June $400 calls were worth $30,000 (a tad more since they had some time value) but for some reason the broker did not automatically exercise those to cover the balance.
It turned out to be no big deal, I just did a single trade, sort of a reverse buy-write, where I purchased 500 shares of Apple and sold my 5 June $400 call contracts, which cleared the negative $15,000 cash balance and brought it up to positive $15,000. It also cleared the buying power, which was a whopping negative $230,000 since I was short 500 shares of Apple stock because the broker had delivered the shares.
I really like calendar spreads because they usually let me roll my calls for another month or two and have more gains, but this is the first time I have been assigned calls early. I guess it was a good thing, since it made me about an extra $2000 for the early assignment...but still, I was freaking out.
If none of this made any sense, that is probably a good thing, as options are a fools game.
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