Compute max profit from single stock trade
Company: Meta
Role: Software Engineer
Category: Coding & Algorithms
Difficulty: Medium
Interview Round: Technical Screen
Given an array prices where prices[i] is the stock price on day i, compute the maximum profit achievable with at most one transaction (one buy and one sell, buy before sell). Return 0 if no profit is possible. Aim for O(n) time and O(
1) extra space. Explain the algorithm, prove correctness, and analyze time/space complexity. Optionally, also return the buy and sell indices.
Quick Answer: This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design efficient array algorithms, reason about time and space complexity constraints, and handle edge cases related to single-transaction profit calculation.