GAZAR

Principal Engineer | Mentor
Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock Algorithm

Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock Algorithm

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;
};

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