In the last two days some of my orders were refused by IBKR with the message: “Invalid Order”. The problem happened near end of day, for two consecutive days, so I opened a ticket.
IBKR support promptly replied to my support request:
CBOE Creation Limit Rule
The CBOE began enforcing a new "Complex Instrument Creation Limit" yesterday.
IBKR exceeded that limit today in SPX. The issue is being reviewed.
Looking up the term yields this document:
Effective November 17, 2025, all Cboe-affiliated U.S. Options Exchanges will enforce Complex instrument creation limits. Firms will be limited to creating 40,000 Complex instruments per day per underlying symbol on the Cboe Options Exchange (C1) and 25,000 per day per underlying symbol on the Cboe BZX Options (BZX), C2 Options (C2), and EDGX Options (EDGX) Exchanges.
This is concerning, as one can’t exit positions when the requests are used up.
Moving the trading to an earlier time might work, but only to the point one is within the first 40,000 of complex orders for a given firm.
A complex instrument only needs to be created once and will exist in the system for the remainder
of the trading day unless tied to a working GTC order.
…
Any complex instrument created on the current trading day but not tied to a working GTC order will
be purged at the end of that trading day. Any complex instrument previously associated with a GTC
order but later results in no associated GTC orders will be purged at the end of the trading week
(typically Friday evening).
Source: https://cdn.cboe.com/resources/membership/US-Options-Complex-Book-Process.pdf
This might solve the problem of getting out from the position:
Submit your Exit orders as GTC as soon as you enter the trade. If your trade can’t be filled by a single order, then set the price for each order to some absurdly high value. This is just to keep the combo in the COB so you are not affected if your firm (broker / mm) runs out of combos for a given day. Later, when you want to exit you either modify the standing order or cancel & resubmit your exit.
I haven’t validated this approach, I’ll report back once it’s confirmed to work.
Made a try with the above mentioned method of posting a standing limit order with unreasonably high price.
If the order’s price is too high at initiation, then IBKR will hold it and monitor it (status color: blue). I suspect this might not work as the order is not held at the exchange and CBOE is refusing the new combos.
This approach seems to work, however:
Send in a standing limit GTC order at the combo’s Ask Price, make sure it lands at the exchange (status color: green). Then change the combo price to something high which will not be filled (or you’d be happy if it were filled). That way, the order remains at the exchange with the higher price.
Some of you reached out and asked the current status of the problem:
I’m aware of at least one user who was affected by this.
Nevertheless - besides the initial two days of struggle - I had no problems entering or exiting in the last 1.5 weeks and I’m not aware of anyone else experiencing the problem.
IBKR closed my ticket without much explanation, so I reopened it to ask for clarification. Will post their response once it arrives.
Response from IBKR, not very detailed, unfortunately:
This issue was reviewed and resolved. IBKR will hold many more non-marketable orders on our servers reducing the complex instruments created and sent to the exchange.
I’ll stick to the standing GTC order approach outlined above.