AbstractWe address the existence of non‐trivial closed invariant subspaces of operators on Banach spaces whenever their square have or, more generally, whether there exists a polynomial with such that the lattice of invariant subspaces of is non‐trivial. In the Hilbert space setting, the ‐problem was posed by Halmos in the seventies and in 2007, Foias, Jung, Ko and Pearcy conjectured it could be equivalent to the Invariant Subspace Problem.