How should I practice Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock?

Start by reading the full statement, solve the visible examples, then compare the pattern against related Bloomberg LP phone screen and onsite interview problems in FastPrep.

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Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock

Bloomberg LP● EasyNEW GRADPHONE SCREENONSITE INTERVIEW

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Problem statement

You are given an integer array prices, where prices[i] is the price of one share on day i.

Choose at most one day to buy and one later day to sell. Return the maximum profit. If no profitable transaction exists, return 0.

Function

maxProfit(prices: int[]) → long

Examples

Example 1

prices = [7,1,5,3,6,4]return = 5

Buy at price 1 and sell later at price 6 for profit 5.

Example 2

prices = [7,6,4,3,1]return = 0

Every later price is lower, so the best choice is not to trade.

Example 3

prices = [3,3,5,0,0,3,1,4]return = 4

Buy at a price of 0 and sell later at 4.

Constraints

1 <= prices.length <= 200000
0 <= prices[i] <= 10^9