LeetCode 121. Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock

Description

Say you have an array for which the $i^{th}$ element is the price of a given stock on day i <script type="math/tex" id="MathJax-Element-59">i</script>.
If you were only permitted to complete at most one transaction (ie, buy one and sell one share of the stock), design an algorithm to find the maximum profit.
Example 1:
Input: [7, 1, 5, 3, 6, 4]
Output: 5
max. difference = 6-1 = 5 (not 7-1 = 6, as selling price needs to be larger than buying price)
Example 2:
Input: [7, 6, 4, 3, 1]
Output: 0
In this case, no transaction is done, i.e. max profit = 0.

Solution

遍历一次数组，用一个变量记录遍历过数中的最小值，然后每次计算当前值和这个最小值之间的差值记为利润，每次选较大的利润来更新。当遍历完成后当前利润即为所求。

class Solution {
public:
    int maxProfit(vector<int>& prices) {
        int res = 0, buy = INT_MAX;
        for (int price : prices) {
            buy = min(buy, price);
            res = max(res, price - buy);
        }
        return res;
    }
};