Several years ago, before IB had universal accounts, I maintained two different accounts. One futures, one equity options. Since I'm not a stock guy my options account suffered from poor trading and had a balance of around $155. Rather than just close it (there was no way I was going to further fund my options BS) I found a 1.50 call in QQQ and bought a 1 lot. A week or so later the call was worth a dime. Thus I had just a tad over 10 bucks net liq. Lo and behold there was one of those mega rallies where the call went back over a buck. I sold it for 1.10 and then hit a few doubles, triples, ect and went from $10 to $2700 in something like 2 months. I remember the last trade in the account was buying $2700 in CSCO calls in front of earnings and those options died a quick death......