Formatting date tick marks on h-axis

Hello Forum Contributors!

This is my first post on this forum and I'm hoping for the best.

My problem is this: I have time series data of the gold price and a stock index, which are displayed together in a graph. The data frequency is daily, but I would like only the years displayed on the horizontal axis. Furthermore, I would like the major tick marks to represent the beginning of a two-year period starting on January 1 in a certain year, but Excel forces me to choose the first observation in the data as the starting point, that is on December 4 1989, so all the major tick marks are on December 4 in subsequent years.

I have attached my workbook and an example of a graph from OxMetrics, that has the horizontal axis I'm looking for, except the minimum is not correctly specified (it's too far in the past).

The problem is then I lose the first month of data in the graph. I would like the major tick marks to start off a bit to the right of the vertical axis, but I'm not sure if that is even possible in excel.