I know this is an old post, but this happened to me today. I'm testing my code using a paper account and running TWS so I can see the positions in TWS. For testing it only opens positions of a single share, long only. And I have it set up to cancel all open orders and sell all open positions just before the close of the regular trading hours. There were 17 open positions and all but one were closed as expected. Just one position, a stock with ticker BTOG, was not closed. I received several errors saying: "Order rejected - reason:The contract is not available for short sale."? This was despite the fact that the open position was long 1 share and the closing order was a MARKET order to sell 1 share. After stopping my code I placed a LIMIT order manually to sell 1 share. It was filled to close the position.
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The error message makes no sense, but I suspect the market order was rejected because it could not be filled immediately on this illiquid stock whereas the limit order waited for a bid to show up.?
