From a fellow SAS programmer/statistician, I wouldn't reccomend using SAS for this kind of thing. Sure it has some advatages in regards to databasing, proc sql, Proc ARIMA, Proc Reg, and things of that nature but there are too many other packages out their that are better for automated trading than SAS. I started out trying to do automated trading in SAS, did alot of programming from a statistical approach, and came to find out that curve fitting (using automatically diagnosing arima modeling routines I wrote) was not the best way to go about automated trading. I have a strong background in Time Series so I thought this would be the best place to start for me...but after serveral months of work decided to go a different direction. You'll find tons of posts on "why" this is the case on the forums so I won't go into it here but I would reccomend looking elsewhere.
I personally use openquant (C#) for my automated trading and program in SAS when it is needed at work. I do use R for some automated trading tasks such as pulling data from IB on occasion, ect. However, this is just my 2 cents from trying to go down the SAS road.