Best time to sell and buy stocks I (leetcode 121)
The initial version of sell stocks problems. You were only permitted to complete at most one transaction. Returning the maximal profit.
All the sell stocks problems could be solved by dynamic programming. For this problem, we could use dp[i] to represent the maximal profit for the first i days, so the answer to the problem is dp[n]. It's obvious that dp[i]=max(dp[i-1],price[i]-lowestprict).
public int maxProfit(int[] prices) {
int lowest=Integer.MAX_VALUE;
int dp=0;
for (int i=0;i<prices.length;i++){
if (prices[i]<lowest) lowest=prices[i];
dp=Math.max(dp,prices[i]-lowest);
}
return dp;
}
Best time to sell and buy stocks II (leetcode 122)
This problem is similar to the problem 121, the only difference is that you can complete as many transactions as you can. As long as you sell the stock before you buy again.
It is much easier than the problem 121. The algorithm is:
public int maxProfit(int[] prices) {
int profit=0;
for (int i=1;i<prices.length;i++)
if (prices[i]>prices[i-1]) profit+=prices[i]-prices[i-1];
return profit;
}
Best time to sell and buy stocks III (leetcode 123)
This time you may at most complete two transactions. The solution to that is to update two variable, dp and dp2.
public int maxProfit(int[] prices) {
int dp=0;
int dp2=0;
if (prices.length==0) return 0;
int lowest=prices[0];
int maxj=dp-prices[0];
for (int i=1;i<prices.length;i++){
if (prices[i]<lowest) lowest=prices[i];
dp=Math.max(dp,prices[i]-lowest);
maxj=Math.max(maxj,dp-prices[i]);
dp2=Math.max(dp2,prices[i]+maxj);
}
return Math.max(dp,dp2);
}