I'm trying to create individual charts of the performance of over 100 separate stocks going back to 1990. It's a line chart starting at 0% at the left axis (1990) and the line moves up or down based on the stock's performance until September 2013. The math for the individual points on the line chart is pretty simple: (closing price at any point in time)/(closing price in January 1990)-1.

I'm using =INDIRECT in my primary worksheet to do the math and create the individual graphs, which pulls raw closing stock price data from another spreadsheet. The problem is that some stocks weren't trading back in 1990 and in those cases, the math is dividing the current stock price by zero. I want to avoid manually finding the first trade date for each stock (which is the denominator in every cell for a given stock) by automating the process.

So my question: Is there a way, using the =INDIRECT function to have the formula automatically calculate performance back to the first non-zero point in time (i.e. when the stock first started trading)? The formula would need to be sophisticated enough to know which cell was the first month of non-zero data.