Retail rates trading

Hey,

I'm a freshman in college with a few thousand in cash and more coming from my school IT job. I'm interested in macro investing and I want to start a trading account to learn how I react to risk etc. I'm thinking my strategy should involve rel value trading between UST and TIPS ETFs and inverse ETFs, ETF futures, index futures, fed funds futures, eurodollar futures, repo futures and perhaps vanilla options covering those areas. ETFs interest me because they don't have the fees normally associated with retail trading (futures do however) and I'd have to learn the ins and outs of them in addition to the STIR stuff. Covering the shorter end of the yield curve seems like a better way to learn about the Fed but i'm worried about fees making it too hard to beat any reasonable indexes. I'd love to hear thoughts on the viability of this loose idea, what indexes/benchmarks (like the Bloomberg Barclays 1-3yr UST index or something) I should be comparing my performance to and how much cash I need to be starting with. I also need to figure out what's the best broker/platform for this. I rent a VPS with 8 GB RAM that I use for some other light stuff. Is there anything I could do with the VPS for retail trading to give me an edge?

Thanks so much for any help!