Let us do some simple accounting. A miner mines 1 Dash. They expend $50 of direct cost doing so. They sell that 1 Dash on an exchange for $55. So the accounts for that "stock" go as follows:

Revenue
============

Sale of 1 Dash: $55

Direct Costs of Sale
============

Electric bills: $50

Gross profit (Loss): $5

So when you account for any mining activity, you are indeed "anchored to something" at least in the sense that you can't take the cost of mining a Peercoin and use that to calculate the profit you made on a Dash. I'll restate what I said above maybe in a more specific way: the miner makes zero profit on any given mined stock "unless they mined that stock at a lower cost than the revenue they made from the sale".