Greedy Algorithms/Best Time to Buy and Sell StockEasy

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Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock

Greedy Algorithms·Easy

You are given an array prices where prices[i] is the price of a given stock on the i-th 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

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.

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

Output: 0

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

Constraints

1 <= prices.length <= 10^5
0 <= prices[i] <= 10^4

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Tests

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Passed32 ms

First attempt — retry to track metric movement here.

Your approach

Pattern:Greedy Algorithms
Time:O(N)
Space:O(1)

Complete approach — pattern and complexity both named.

Coach

What you got right

You correctly matched the sorted input requirement and implemented a linear-time scan using two pointers.

Where it diverged

No divergence detected. The code correctly aligns with the stated approach.

Next attempt: focus on

Try solving related sliding window problems to build familiarity with two-pointer variants.

Signals

No signals fired — clean run, you stayed in flow.