The frenzied investment in the 90s soft toys seems unlikely today, but as a child I bought into the craze with enthusiasm

In the late 2000s, the singer Lily Allen was asked to perform a streamed gig in exchange for “hundreds of thousands” of bitcoin. She told them: “As if.” She later tweeted of the decision: “#idiot.”

Such investment horror stories are common: the offer you passed up on that would have set you up for life; the opportunity you thought too good to be true that – you realised only too late, with no small horror – eventually proved really that good. The question that keeps me up at night is: what if I had sold my Beanie Babies when the market was hot, instead of 15 years later?

The pseudonymous “weird Twitter” personality Dril, known for his absurdist humour, brought up painful memories for many this week when he tweeted: “Beanie babies are just bitcoins in real life.” “This makes too much sense to be a @dril tweet,” someone replied, their wince practically audible.

At the turn of the millennium, Beanie Babies, a vast line of stuffed animals produced by the US manufacturer Ty, were being widely collected not only as toys but as a financial investment – and justifiably so, at the time. Beanie Babies reportedly once constituted 10% of all sales on eBay, with an average selling price of $30 – six times their retail value. Some of the rarer toys reached six figures. In just three years, their creator, Ty Warner, became a billionaire.

“The only smart financial decision I ever made was selling my Beanie Babies at the height of the craze,” tweeted the writer Jennifer Wright, in reply to Dril. “My mom asked me if I was sure, and I looked at her like she was crazy. They were toys that I, a child, could exchange for much more money.”

My younger sister, Jess, and I were also enthusiastic investors, pooling our pocket money to amass about 70 of the critters – about 20kg’s worth. When our family relocated to New Zealand, our collection came with us, at no small expense; we sagely reassured our parents that it would be worth it – cashing them in would put us through university.

We even bought the US collectors’ magazine Mary Beth’s Bean Bag World – which sold nearly half a million copies of its second edition before moving to monthly publication – and studied its secondary market price list to determine which of our precious toys were most likely to be best-served by a tag protector.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bearly talking … Frances and Harold Mountain are ordered to divide up their collection of Beanie Babies in a US court. Photograph: Stringer/Reuters

It has been called “the strangest speculative mania of all time”. There were fist fights, frauds, stampedes, smuggling rings, armed robberies, bitter divorce settlements, even a murder. A few specific Beanie Babies did end up being valuable, but, as powerfully, even upsettingly, detailed by journalist Zac Bissonnette in The Great Beanie Baby Bubble in 2015: “The end of the craze was swift and devastating.”

Of course, I tell myself, these things always seem obvious in hindsight. But my mistake was to wait more than 10 years after the height of the Beanie Babies buzz to sell them. There is accumulating value, and then there is accumulating dust in a bin bag in your sister’s broom cupboard; so rarely is there crossover between the two.

Jess and I eventually ended up listing our prized collection as a bulk lot “inc sentimental value” on an online auction site, for a 50p reserve. It sold for about £35, which we split between us. The lucky bidder turned out to own a second-hand shop and clearly intended to sell each toy for a few quid. He told us he wouldn’t be home when we came to drop them off: “Just leave them in the bin out front.”

We dropped them off, and cut our losses. In the witching hour, when I am haunted by the riches that could have been, I comfort myself that I could have come off worse in the Beanie Baby boom. It could have been a murder charge.