DSA problem
Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock
You are given an array prices where prices[i] is the price of a given stock on the i-th 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.
You must buy before you sell, so the selling day index must be strictly greater than the buying day index.
Examples
Example 1
Input:
prices = [7,1,5,3,6,4]Output:
5Explanation: Buy on day 2 (price = 1) and sell on day 5 (price = 6), profit = 6 - 1 = 5. Note that buying on day 2 and selling on day 1 is not allowed because you must buy before you sell.
Example 2
Input:
prices = [7,6,4,3,1]Output:
0Explanation: In this case, no transactions are done and the max profit = 0 because prices only decrease.
Constraints
- 1 <= prices.length <= 10^5
- 0 <= prices[i] <= 10^4
3 hints and a full solution walkthrough with step-by-step visualizations are available in the practice editor.