Buy & Sell Stocks

Lecture 100:-  Buy & Sell Stocks

To maximize profit by buying and selling stocks, you can use a simple algorithm that traverses the list of stock prices and keeps track of the minimum price seen so far and the maximum profit that can be obtained by selling at the current price. Here's a Python function that implements this algorithm:

pythonCopy code

def max_profit(prices):    if not prices or len(prices) < 2:        return 0    min_price = prices[0]    max_profit = 0    for price in prices[1:]:        max_profit = max(max_profit, price - min_price)        min_price = min(min_price, price)    return max_profit # Test the function stock_prices = [7, 1, 5, 3, 6, 4] print(max_profit(stock_prices))  # Output: 5 (Buy at 1, sell at 6) stock_prices = [7, 6, 4, 3, 1] print(max_profit(stock_prices))  # Output: 0 (No profitable trade possible)

In this code, the max_profit() function takes a list of stock prices as input. It initializes variables min_price to the first price in the list and max_profit to 0. Then, it iterates through the rest of the prices. For each price, it updates min_price to the minimum of the current price and the previously seen minimum. It also updates max_profit to the maximum of the current profit and the difference between the current price and the minimum price seen so far.

The final result will be the maximum profit that can be obtained from the given list of stock prices by buying at a lower price and selling at a higher price. The algorithm runs in O(n) time complexity, where n is the number of elements in the list of stock prices.