Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock II

Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock II is a Medium 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 integer array prices where prices[i] is the price of a given stock on the ith day.

On each day, you may decide to buy and/or sell the stock. You can only hold at most one share of the stock at any time. However, you can buy it then immediately sell it on the same day.

Find and return the maximum profit you can achieve.

Example 1:

Input: prices = [7,1,5,3,6,4] Output: 7 Explanation: Buy on day 2 (price = 1) and sell on day 3 (price = 5), profit = 5-1 = 4. Then buy on day 4 (price = 3) and sell on day 5 (price = 6), profit = 6-3 = 3. Total profit is 4 + 3 = 7.

Example 2:

Input: prices = [1,2,3,4,5] Output: 4 Explanation: Buy on day 1 (price = 1) and sell on day 5 (price = 5), profit = 5-1 = 4. Total profit is 4.

Example 3:

Input: prices = [7,6,4,3,1] Output: 0 Explanation: There is no way to make a positive profit, so we never buy the stock to achieve the maximum profit of 0.

Constraints:

- 1 <= prices.length <= 3 104

- 0 <= prices[i] <= 104

Topics and companies

Topics: Array, Dynamic Programming, Greedy.

Reported in interviews at Amazon, Apple, tcs, Microsoft, Facebook, Uber.

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

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

Problems related to Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock II

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

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