Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock

Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock is a Easy Data Structures and Algorithms interview problem you can solve, run and submit on Thita.ai. It belongs to the Greedy Patterns pattern, in the Buy/Sell Stock subpattern.

Problem statement

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.

Example 1:

Input: prices = [7,1,5,3,6,4] Output: 5 Explanation: 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: 0 Explanation: In this case, no transactions are done and the max profit = 0.

Constraints:

- 1 <= prices.length <= 105

- 0 <= prices[i] <= 104

Topics and companies

Topics: Array, Dynamic Programming.

Reported in interviews at Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Adobe, Google, tcs, Bloomberg, eBay, Uber, ByteDance, Goldman Sachs and others.

How to practise Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock on Thita.ai

Starter code is provided in C, C#, C++, Go, Java, JavaScript and Python. Your solution runs against 5 test cases for this problem, with the AI coach available for a hint when you are stuck rather than a finished answer. The reference solution runs in O(n) time and O(1) space.

Open Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock in the code editor, or read the Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock editorial for a worked solution with its approach and complexity analysis.

Where Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock sits in the DSA pattern sheet

Problems related to Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock

Other problems that use the same Buy/Sell Stock and Greedy Patterns techniques:

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