Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock
Question
Given a list of stock prices, return the maximum profit that can be made by buying and selling a stock.
If it's not possible to make any profit, return 0.
Input: prices = [4, 9, 2, 8, 6, 12]
Output: 10
The maximum profit that can be made is by buying the stock on the third day when the price is 2 and selling it on the last day when the price is 12, which gives a maximum profit of 10.
Input: prices = [10, 7, 5, 3, 1]
Output: 0
It's not possible to make any profit by buying and selling the stock so the output should be 0.
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Example solution
Complexity
- Time complexity: O(n)
The time complexity of this solution is O(n), where n is the length of the input list of prices, since the solution only iterates through the list once.
- Space complexity: O(1)
The space complexity is O(1), since the solution uses only a constant amount of extra space, regardless of the size of the input list.
Notes
Thank you!