Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock

TCS NQT Coding Easy

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:

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.

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

Output: 0

Explanation: In this case, no transactions are done and the max profit = 0.

Input: prices = [3,2,6,5,0,3]

Output: 4

Explanation: Buy on day 2 (price = 2) and sell on day 3 (price = 6), profit = 6-2 = 4.

Constraints

  • 1 ≤ prices.length ≤ 105
  • 0 ≤ prices[i] ≤ 104