First Impressions of IB and Futures Trading

I spent some time last night getting used to the IB system and making paper trades in NASDAQ 100, 10 year bond, and Australian Dollar futures. Someone posted recently in response to one of my blogposts that trading all three would be like having three full time jobs, if trading QQQQ was like a full time job. I don't think so but it is hard to execute a paper trading strategy and a real trading strategy at the same time if they are not identical and you also have another real full time job... This morning I was feeling rather nervous, not because I would lose "money" on the paper trading but that it was taking my attention away from the real trading and some time today I need to get a lot of other work done. Being a professor gives me a lot of flexibility about when I do a large portion of my work, but it still has to get done... So I closed out the paper trades and either later today or tomorrow I will take a look at the daily statement generated to get familiar with that. IB also update your account value on the fly and I found some quirks in that, some of which may just be bugs in the paper trading simulation. One is that the standalone Trader Workstation (TWS) gives you the current profit and loss and realized and unrealized portions on each position. But when I opened a chart (which is initially disabled on new accounts) all that disappeared! The browser based version of TWS didn't seem to give me that at all. I will have to check my real account. Also I didn't really understand how they compute various of the figures regarding margin - there doesn't seem to be much rationale. I asked an experienced futures trader and he said he didn't understand it either. I would have expected that the initial required margin would be moved into my "commodities account" and then that value would fluctuate with the profit and loss. But the amount is somewhere between the initial and maintenance margin. I should probably do some deliberately "money" losing trades and see what happens when the maintenance margin is hit. The charts are pretty flexible though as slightly less user friendly (not surprising) than those in Ameritrade. They don't look as dynamic as Ameritrade's charts - but if you look closely they show exactly the same information.