Welcome to Day 7 of 100 Days of Code where today we solve yet another most frequently asked easy array problem called – Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock. If you want to become part of the series and want to continue on the same, refer to the following page:
Let us explore the problem statement first.
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.
Read more about the problem here:
https://leetcode.com/problems/best-time-to-buy-and-sell-stock/
Solution:
Now let us look into the solution.
Here we are initializing prices[i] to a maximum value. Next, we will be iterating through the prices array and see if we can find any other minimum value. Also within the iteration, we will calculate the maximum profit till now.
Next, we will be returning Profit after the iteration is complete.
Time and Space Complexity:
Here the time complexity is O(N) as we iterate through all the elements from an Array.
Space complexity is O(1) as we are not using any additional Data Structures.
