Quote from Joetrader:
Some of the biggest quant firms on the street use SAS for backtesting and automation. We are not in the league with the biggest, but we force all of our new quants to learn SAS day 1 and all of our systems are written in SAS. the statistics are fast and error free and when you are developing heavy quant models, you would be surprised how many PhD's mess up the statistics with a simple error so when we bring someone in we recode their idea in SAS and it is definitely a joykill. Also it is blazing fast.