LeetCode 121. Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock

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.

Example 2:

Input: prices = [7,6,4,3,1]
Output: 0
Explanation: In this case, no transactions are done and the max profit = 0.

class Solution {
    public int maxProfit(int[] prices) {
        int min = prices[0];
        int maxProfit = 0;
        for(int i = 0; i < prices.length; i++){
            int profit = prices[i] - min;
            if(profit > maxProfit){
                maxProfit = profit;
            }
            if (prices[i] < min){
                min = prices[i];
            }
        }
        return maxProfit;
    }
}