Maximizing profit for given stock quotes

Question

I was asked this question while interviewing for a startup and saw this again in the recent contest at

Code Sprint:systems

**The question :

You are

Answer 1

I just solved that problem in a contest site. I think I got a simpler algorithm than the accepted answer.

1. smax = maximum stock price from the list
2. then find the profit by assuming you have bought all the stocks till smax 
   and you sell it at the price of smax
3. then check if smax is the last element of the stock price list 
   if yes then return profit as answer, 
   if no 
   then make a new list containing stock prices after smax to the last stock price
   and repeat steps 1-3 and keep adding profit of each iteration to get the final profit.