The tech sector is the hottest industry on Wall Street. The tech-heavy Nasdaq has nearly doubled over the last five years alone.

But not every stock is worth owning. Today, we’re showing you the “must have” tech stock you need in your portfolio.

This stock isn’t one of the big-name tech stocks, like the FANG stocks either. Every investor knows about those companies. This is a smaller firm with just as much growth potential as its expensive rivals.

And it’s getting a major catalyst from a new trend in the American workforce…

Independent Contractors Are a Massive Industry
The U.S. economy is in great shape.

In early September, you see, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) announced how the employment market had done recently.

The economy added over 200,000 jobs during August, while unemployment came in at 3.9%, the lowest it’s been in decades.

Even better, wages have finally begun to rise. Year over year, wages rose 2.9%, the fastest clip since mid-2009.

But one trend stands out in the general labor market above all others. And that’s the rise of the independent contractor.

Independent contractors are the folks who work for a living, but aren’t officially employees of the companies they work for. They simply contract out their labor to places that need it.

This can be anything from a “gig” like Uber to high-powered consultants who come in to help a business solve a problem. This trend is happening just at the right time, too.

And the independent contractor workforce is booming, rising three times as fast as the labor market overall. It’s currently worth a whopping $1.4 trillion to the entire economy.

That’s where our top tech stock to buy now comes in.

This company has been around for a while, but it provides a service absolutely crucial for independent contractors and freelancers.

As this type of work becomes more popular – and more lucrative – this tech stock will reap the rewards…

One of the Best Tech Stocks on the Market
Intuit Inc. (NASDAQ: INTU) is a leading company for the self-employed.

Intuit’s best-known product is TurboTax, the tax preparation software. It enjoys over 50 million users.

But Intuit also offers a well-known accounting package, QuickBooks, which has over 5.5 million users. Its allows independent contractors and small-business owners to keep tabs on their sales, taxes, expenses, reports, and bank accounts in one dashboard.

Intuit, which is based in Silicon Valley, rolled out QuickBooks Online Self-Employed, a product to help the independent contractor base, in 2014, just as that group started to climb in numbers. It was a major success, and now has 700,000 users.

The popularity of the product is one of the reasons that the company’s unit for self-employed folks and small businesses expanded 18% year over year in the recent quarter.

In fact, Intuit itself surveys the market and forecasts that independent workers will climb to 43% of the overall workforce by 2020. That’s just two years away.

Intuit is a whiz at using customer data to develop new products. Take people who use its financial app Mint, which allows for the tracking of expenses and income. In 2013, Intuit realized that users had a desire to keep professional expenses and personal expenses separate.

They didn’t lose any time making sure Mint users could do that. As a result, Mint has risen in popularity among the self-employed, who can use the app to keep track of their expenses, get alerts about when bills are due, check their credit scores, develop and track a budget, and receive helpful tips on financial topics.

As a result, tech stock investors who choose Intuit have a good chance of making money in their portfolios.

In the fourth fiscal quarter (ended July 31), for example, company sales rose 17% year over year, to $938 million. Plus, earnings per share rose 100% to hit $0.18.

Wall Street analysts are catching on. Right now, they’re projecting Intuit stock will climb another 25% over the next year alone. But as the independent contracting movement grows, so could this stock.

Source: Money Morning