The solution to LeetCode Problem 122: Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock II in JavaScript
You are given an integer array prices
where prices[i]
is the price of a given stock on the ith
day.
On each day, you may decide to buy and/or sell the stock. You can only hold at most one share of the stock at any time. However, you can buy it then immediately sell it on the same day.
Find and return the maximum profit you can achieve.
Example 1:
Input: prices = [7,1,5,3,6,4] Output: 7 Explanation: Buy on day 2 (price = 1) and sell on day 3 (price = 5), profit = 5-1 = 4. Then buy on day 4 (price = 3) and sell on day 5 (price = 6), profit = 6-3 = 3. Total profit is 4 + 3 = 7.
Example 2:
Input: prices = [1,2,3,4,5] Output: 4 Explanation: Buy on day 1 (price = 1) and sell on day 5 (price = 5), profit = 5-1 = 4. Total profit is 4.
Example 3:
Input: prices = [7,6,4,3,1] Output: 0 Explanation: There is no way to make a positive profit, so we never buy the stock to achieve the maximum profit of 0.
Constraints:
1 <= prices.length <= 3 * 104
0 <= prices[i] <= 104
Solution
The key to this problem is to realize that we can simply add up all the positive differences between consecutive elements in the array.
This is because we are allowed to make as many transactions as we want, so we can take advantage of every opportunity to buy low and sell high.
Here is the solution in JavaScript:
Let’s go through an example to see how this solution works.