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.
The process to request complex instruments is referred to as the Complex Instrument Creation (CIC) process as described in the Instrument Creation section of the Cboe Titanium U.S. Options Complex Book Process. These are requested via Security Definition Request messages and New Complex Instrument messages.
On the effective date, Cboe will begin enforcing a limit of 40,000 complex instrument creations per firm per trading day per underlying symbol. Once a firm has reached the CIC limit for an underlying, they will begin receiving rejects for Security Definition Request messages; A: Exceeds firm CIC limit. This will only impact the creation of new complex instruments. An order on an existing complex symbol will not count towards the limit nor will firms who have breached the limit be rejected when entering new orders on existing complex instruments.
SPX and SPXW will be considered separate root symbol since they are on different matching units.
