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DSA›Arrays›Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock
EasyArrays

Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock

arraygreedysliding-window

Problem

You are given an array prices where prices[i] is the price of a given stock on the ith day.

You want to maximize your profit by choosing a single day to buy one stock and choosing a different day in the future to sell that stock.

Return the maximum profit you can achieve from this transaction. If you cannot achieve any profit, return 0.

Examples

Example 1

Input: prices = [7,1,5,3,6,4]

Output: 5

Explanation: Buy on day 2 (price=1), sell on day 5 (price=6), profit=5.

Example 2

Input: prices = [7,6,4,3,1]

Output: 0

Explanation: No transaction gives profit.

Constraints

  • •1 <= prices.length <= 10^5
  • •0 <= prices[i] <= 10^4

Hints

Hint 1

Track the minimum price seen so far and the maximum profit.

Solutions

public int maxProfit(int[] prices) {
    int minPrice = Integer.MAX_VALUE;
    int maxProfit = 0;
    for (int price : prices) {
        if (price < minPrice) {
            minPrice = price;          // found a cheaper buy day
        } else {
            maxProfit = Math.max(maxProfit, price - minPrice);
        }
    }
    return maxProfit;
}
Java

Time: O(n) · Space: O(1)