Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock Algorithm
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.
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.
const maxProfit = (prices) => {
let left = 0; // Buy
let right = 1; // sell
let max_profit = 0;
while (right < prices.length) {
if (prices[left] < prices[right]) {
let profit = prices[right] - prices[left]; // our current profit
max_profit = Math.max(max_profit, profit);
} else {
left = right;
}
right++;
}
return max_profit;
};