0121 Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock

Solved at: 2022-07-13

Question

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.

Solution

class Solution:
    def maxProfit(self, prices: List[int]) -> int:
        if not prices:
            return 0
        minv = prices[0]
        profit = 0
        for i, price in enumerate(prices):
            if price < minv:
                minv = price
            else:
                if profit < prices[i] - minv:
                    profit = prices[i] - minv
        return profit

I had to get a hint to keep the minimum value so far.

• Time Complexity: $O(n)$
• Space Complexity: $O(1)$

Results

Runtime

• 1698 ms, faster than 38.38% of Python3 online submissions for Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock.

Memory Usage

• 25 MB, less than 37.97% of Python3 online submissions for Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock.