OK, I might be missing something obvious here but...
New trades that are signing up are appearing as blue with a line through them, I check the trade and enable them. They are then showing as blue (without the line) in my list of trades. Also my number of new trades in Options->Main Settings says I have that number of trades still pending..
new trades are marked with blue color. Disabled trades have a line-through. While trade is marked as "new" they have to reach start raw & start click parameters before they get any traffic in return. You can edit trade and set "new" trade parameter to "no". You can also use mass edit form to make this faster.
By the way, you can setup default values for "new trade" window (options / general/ new trade defaults) and "webmaster.cgi" (options / webmaster / main).