Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock With Python

The problem

Say you have an array prices for which the i^th element is the price of a given stock on day i.

Design an algorithm to find the maximum profit. You may complete as many transactions as you like (i.e., buy one and sell one share of the stock multiple times).

Note: You may not engage in multiple transactions at the same time (i.e., you must sell the stock before you buy again).

Example 1:

Input: [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.

Example 2:

Input: [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.
             Note that you cannot buy on day 1, buy on day 2 and sell them later, as you are
             engaging multiple transactions at the same time. You must sell before buying again.

Example 3:

Input: [7,6,4,3,1]
Output: 0
Explanation: In this case, no transaction is done, i.e. max profit = 0.

Constraints:

• 1 <= prices.length <= 3 * 10 ^ 4
• 0 <= prices[i]&nbsp;<= 10 ^ 4

The solution

# Our function takes in a list of day prices
def maxProfit(prices):
    # Store our max profit
    maxprofit = 0

    # Enumerate through the price list
    for i, item in enumerate(prices):
        # Only start checking from day 2
        if i>0:
            # If the current day is more than the last
            if prices[i] > prices[i-1]:
                # Increment our profit
                maxprofit += prices[i] - prices[i-1]

    # Return the max profit integer
    return maxprofit